External Book Review: The Great Passage by Shion Miura

Happy Monday! I’m switching it up and posting on Monday, Wednesday and Friday this week instead of the normal Tuesday/Friday schedule. Why you may ask? Well because, what some of you may know, and others don’t, is that Word-for-Sense isn’t the only place that I publish book reviews. I also write occasional reviews for Three Percent, a resource for international literature at the University of Rochester which is affiliated with Open Letter.

My most recent review for Three Percent is of The Great Passage by Shion Miura, which can be read here. I cannot post the full review here of course, that is what the link is for, but as for a snippet of what the book is about, The Great Passage is a book that centers around a fictional book, also called The Great Passage, which is to be a groundbreaking new dictionary of the Japanese language. The Great Passage (that is to say, the real-world book I reviewed) is an excellent novel, and while I am unable to read the Japanese original, and thus could have very well missed much of the nuance that comes with editing a Japanese dictionary in particular, Juliet Winters Carpenter did an excellent job of making the text feel just as invigorating as I image the original text would have felt.

Please do read my review, linked above as well as here, and let me know what you think, either on the comments here, or on the original post on the Three Percent site.